Atomic Playboy

• Building accessible tables — how to make your <table> tags readable for visually impaired people.
• “Links & Javascript living together in harmony”: — the proper way to use Javascript in links.
• Liquid design for the web — why it’s sometimes a bad idea to have a web page with a static width.
• Layoutomatic — A CSS generator that generates styles similar to the one currently on my site, complete with boxmodel hacks for the stupid IE bug. Found via Zeldman.

Incidentally, I just wrote <cow> instead of <code> while writing this entry.

This judge in the Microsoft vs. Hyperphrase case certainly does have a nice way with words.

Microsoft’s insouciance so flustered Hyperphrase that nine of its attorneys [...] promptly filed a motion to strike the summary judgment motion as untimely. Counsel used bolded italics to make their point, a clear sign of grievous iniquity by one’s foe. True, this court did enter an order on June 20, 2003 ordering the parties not to flyspeck each other, but how could such an order apply to a motion filed almost five minutes late? Microsoft’s temerity was nothing short of a frontal assault on the precept of punctuality so cherished by and vital to this court.

“Whenever someone thinks that they can replace SSL/SSH with something much better that they designed this morning over coffee, their computer speakers should generate some sort of penis-shaped sound wave and plunge it repeatedly into their skulls until they achieve enlightenment.”
— Peter Gutmann

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

Jeremy Hadley had an image that needed color correction. I gave it a shot. Before:

And after:

The sky is still a bit too purple, but that’s what you get from 15 seconds of Photoshopping.

An interesting article about some sites who are switching to RSS feeds instead of news letters.

“E-mail is dead, period,” declares Chris Pirillo, the Internet entrepreneur who distributes about 400,000 e-mail newsletters weekly. “I don’t care what kind of legislation goes through, people aren’t signing up for newsletters anymore. People are assuming that every e-mail publisher is a spammer.” Internet News

That’s quite excellent. Personally, I see RSS feeds as less intrusive than an email. Emails just appear in my inbox (I usually have no rules for newsletters), whereas an RSS feed shows when it’s updated so I can read it at my leisure.

About.com’s e-mail guide, Heinz Tschabitscher, agrees. In a note titled RSS Feeds are the Better Email Newsletters, Tschabitscher touts RSS as the bona-fide answer to spam. “The best thing about RSS is that if you subscribe to an RSS feed, you only get what you want. If you tell the feed reader to stop collecting a site’s feed, it will stop. And there’s no spam,” he declared. Internet News

There are, however, a few factual errors in the article:

Mickiewicz says RSS was never intended to syndicate anything besides headlines with descriptions and warned that an RSS feed can lead to bandwidth wastage. “If you’re on a shared account or your bandwidth is restricted, it can mean a big hit to your hosting bill. Imagine, 100,000 subscribers checking your RSS feed 4-6 times a day for updates!,” Mickiewicz wrote in SitePoint Editor’s Note. Internet News

The solution, which is already implemented in most of the RSS aggregators, is called Last-Modified headers HTTP Conditional GET. Here’s how it works: Your aggregator goes to the server and says “Hi, I last downloaded this RSS feed four hours ago. Has it changed?” to which the server replies either “Nope,” in which case the aggregator doesn’t bother to download it again, or “Yup,” making the aggregator download it. I believe that Apache sends these headers by default.

On my 34th birthday, March 21st 2014, I may get an asteroid for present! Isn’t that nice? (Via Antipixel)

The British agency responsible for identifying potentially hazardous asteroids says US astronomers are warning of a possible collision in 2014.

The UK Government’s Near Earth Object Centre says American astronomers have discovered a large, fast-approaching asteroid that could hit the earth on 21 March, 2014.

But they add the chances of it doing so are just 1 in 909,000. BBC News